Lonely? Start Here.

Growing up in a large, conservative family it never occurred to me the future could hold such loneliness as I often experienced as an adult. Yet while loneliness often seems a very personal experience the majority of our generations have been uncommonly plagued by an epidemic of loneliness, which is most ironic considering there have never been so many humans on the planet.

This loneliness also has been a primary factor in the driving of social media and its content, because there are lots of people without relationships or other real-world opportunities that normally take up the hours of a human life. Those who are both stupid and shallow see many lonely people on the internet and blame the internet and social media for causing the loneliness epidemic, but for most of us the internet is the only opportunity we have for finding connection and we were all lonely before we even discovered it. As I discuss in my chapter on inventory in The Perfect Child, this kind of behavior is actually indicative of a psychological type described by the Karpman Model of triangulation as a ‘helper,’ which is a person has the appearance of offering help but does so in a way that does not solve their problem, or often actually makes it worse, because shaming people doesn’t do anything to empower and instead is simply an opportunity for opportunists like the ‘helper’ type to exploit for their own fulfillment.

There are also many populations of lonely people on the internet whom similarly believe our loneliness is because other people refuse to give us what we want or need, for instance the many young men who feel that winning a relationship with a young woman is too difficult and that women are unreasonable, demanding, or otherwise unavailable. Or we may simply think that even real friends are similarly difficult to win and maintain and that while we might desire relationships real people are just too difficult to deal with and the risk of exposing ourselves to that vulnerability greater than any potential rewards anyway. In TPC I relate a story of the time where I was standing on the field at recess in sixth grade watching the other boys play touch-football (American football), and wishing how I could play with them, and because I was taller than all of them was immediately invited onto the field. I had no idea how to play but I also didn’t think they would actually throw me the ball. Being a natural athlete, they did, and I caught it and ran down the field but as the other boys neared I panicked and tossed it off to a teammate. The boys stopped in disbelief, “oh,” said one, “you can’t do that,” and instead of just staying on the field or asking them to teach me the rules I was mortified with embarrassment (probably exaggerated from being autistic) and left in embarrassment.

If life is like this game of touch-football we are not participating because 1) we need access to opportunity for social engagement and 2) we lack the skills that are actually required to participate. It is also important to realize that lacking either of these requisites is not our fault—we do not set the conditions of our life and upbringing, and normally parents are the ones which teach us these skills and help provide opportunity, but because of the long history of war which disrupted many generations from World War 1 and 2 to the Cold War, Vietnam, Korea, and all the political subterfuge and warmongering committed by the United States and its allies our parents and grandparents generations were the most ill-equipped to parent than what normally occurs in human society, traumatized both by war and the threat of war they instead chased money and ideology as solutions to their own existential traumas, building out our country into vast webs of roads and interstates to connect cars and goods but not people and societies. Absconding to vacations in beautiful locations like France and Switzerland they don’t even recognize the ironic disparity between the reasons they go there and the empty void which exists in our own towns and cities, where even though a single city can today contain a greater population than the entire country did in its infancy there seems a dearth of opportunity to win friends and lovers because we are always in our cars driving everywhere to earn money to buy stuff so we can live in these overbuilt and underfunded urban wastelands filled by people who lack effective skills to survive the game of life.

Yet people who also live in farming and rural communities are plagued by some of the highest rates of depression and suicide, not recognizing that their literal geographic separation from friends and neighbors is at the root of their despair and hopelessness (in addition to exposure to toxic agrochemicals, however, as discussed in Fuck Portion Control). Small, quaint towns in England such as the Cotswolds which are a frequent destination for tourists admiring its charm were an ironic product of earlier capitalist exploitation of workers because aristocratic land-hoarders build small, local communities in which to house their exploited workers while sparing most of the land for production but which then had the ironic effect of forcing people in close quarters where they found abundant opportunity to meet friends and start families, and ‘third-places’ like pubs, schools, town squares, markets, churches, and parks where they could congregate. In the wide-open farmland of America there was plenty of space to spread out, so people could secure their own piece of land but then ended up living completely separated from other people, and though they might find success in farming and can walk out their backdoor to go to work (instead of bike, walk, or drive to it like everybody else) they spend most of every day never seeing or meeting other people.

This is the problem then of the first requirement for the eradication of loneliness, which is that our very built environment impairs the opportunity to meet people in the first place. Most of us can’t do anything about the built environment but you can move to a place which has light-rail public transit, bike trails and walkable infrastructure, parks, coffee shops, and markets where there is more opportunity to meet other people with common interests. Volunteering to help at animal shelters and walk dogs or play with cats, or volunteering with a local advocacy group, conservation organization, or getting involved in city government and politics can also be activities which help to transcend limitations imposed by the environment. But many of us can also affect this problem by getting involved in local communities—starting coffee shops or cafes to provide those services for local residents, or starting an advocacy group which lobbies your local government to build and maintain parks, bike paths, and walkable infrastructure, and even to redevelop ineffective neighborhoods so that citizens can actually start and grow local businesses, cafes, coffee shops, markets, bike shops, dog parks, and other infrastructure that provides for these needs.

The second problem of loneliness is that we simply lack the skills required not only to start but also maintain relationships of all kinds, from friends to business to lovers and making a family, and this is the primary problem faced by those who feel that having relationships is impossibly difficult because, like when I was a child and did not even know how to play football and tried one day to step into a game, was immediately rebuffed by my inability to play it simply from ignorance and being unempowered to effectively participate. But unlike sport, where the competition gets more difficult the better players are, relationships, love, sex, family, friends, get easier when the players have better skills, because relationships are only competitions for people who suck at relationships and are only hard because of the control and coping mechanisms which plague them which are in turn a response to the absence of more effective skills. In The Perfect Child I also discuss how our levels of trauma and control and coping mechanisms limit our access to people whom share similar levels of trauma and control and coping mechanisms to ourselves—for instance, no mature, kind, loving woman is going to want anything to do with a man that is paralyzed by a profound sense of insecurity. This is not because there is anything wrong with the man but simply because she cannot relate to someone who does not love himself as she does herself. Indeed even if such an opportunity were to present itself the man might not even be interested because his sense of insecurity is so great as to be felt every time he is near her and the stress drives us off anyway. Similarly no mature, stable, kind, devastating man is going to be interested in a woman who is emotionally volatile and engages in blaming and shaming control mechanisms because he intuitively recognizes that as manipulative control behavior, and only men who themselves engage in such behavior will be available to her.

I often rejected men I thought were too attractive because the insecurity of knowing they could have their pick of other men made me feel powerless in a relationship. But this not at all how relationships work—it is only how we who lack effective life skills believe they work, because we for instance base our own self worth on our physical appearance (and often do that also to others). The problem is that because of the absence of effective life skills we only ever interact with people whom also similarly lack effective life skills and thus begin to think everyone is difficult and relationships are impossible when instead our experience is only limited to others we have access to with the same kinds of unresolved trauma, fear, insecurity, and coping mechanisms. Relationships in fact are only difficult for people who are selfish, and otherwise they are wonderful and easy and full of love and fulfillment, but to access them in the first place we require skills that we simply do not have because our parents in turn also did not have them and thus were not able to teach them to us, because of course we cannot give to others what we ourselves do not have in the first place.

What we whom are insecure do not realize is that the possibility of losing a partner is the very thing which makes relationships special—that both persons actively choose at all times to be in it, regardless of the fact that either could leave at any time for any reason. Being OKAY with this uncertainty is in fact one of the very skills we lack that is required to resolve loneliness, not things we might expect like being a good conversationalist, being interesting, or being good with money which are not at all required for a good relationship and are only the shallow control mechanisms required by traumatized people which make relationships difficult. Instead, useful relationship skills are things like being able to handle life, people, and disappointment. The ability to correct mistakes and say sorry is one of absolute vital importance for the maintenance of relationships which many people have no idea how to do, because we all make mistakes and will need to demonstrate to those in our lives that we value their presence so much we are willing to subvert our own ego and correct errors when they occur to make the relationship safe for them, and instead make it unsafe when we do not have this skill and thus lose people as a consequence. Being secure in love and intimacy, because of the threat of potential loss, is also a skill that most of us do not have, but the good news is we can actually teach ourselves these required skills, which is achieved by the practice of inventory therapy as discussed in both my books (The Perfect Child goes deeper into the psychology of these things, though), because this helps alleviate us of the control and coping mechanisms such as insecurity on which we rely to replace more effective life skills like confidence we lack, and by resolving the coping mechanism we end up trying new behaviors which become more effective because they are not informed by fear and insecurity and we end up teaching ourselves new and more effective ways by which to live life and find more love, friendship, and success than we could beforehand.

You might also be interested in reading Are You Beautiful (the Answer is Yes)? Learn more about Karpman types in Which Karpman Type are You? Don’t destroy your body in attempts to get others to like you in Steroids are Stupid and Dangerous, or learn how to resolve depression in The Cure For Depression.